mother’s trip and crossing the Amur back north.
“I saw there were gaps in the border wall, and had energy to swim,” he recalled. But family ties held him back.
“I thought... all my family will still be here — what will they do? All those old people and children?” he said.
“So I stayed. I thought whatever happens will happen. If we live or die, it will be together.”
As well as calls to attack former landlords, intellectuals and their descendants as so-called “class enemies”, Maoism had a virulent anti-foreign strain.
During the Cultural Revolution anyone who had had contact with foreigners was liable to be branded a spy. The country’s legal system virtually collapsed, replaced by mob justice.
In the 1960s nearly three-quarters of the 300-odd people of Hongjiang, in the far northeastern province of Heilongjiang, had Russian blood, making them prime targets as tensions mounted and Chinese and Russian troops exchanged fire over the Amur.
“They would accuse you of a crime, whatever they said you were, you were,” said half-Russian villager Xu Yingjie, 76 — no relation.
“At the sessions someone would accuse you of being a Soviet spy. The person accused would deny it, and then they would be beaten.”
Zhang Yunfu was half-Russian and had provided intelligence to Soviet soldiers fighting Japan. But years later, officials wielded letters he sent to the Soviet Union as irrefutable evidence of disloyalty, and he was imprisoned in a cowshed, subject to regular beatings.
In August 1968, he committed suicide.
Nearly five decades later, his son Zhang Yunshan — 13 at the time — matter-of-factly described his father’s death and the hasty burial organised by Communist cadres.
“My father couldn’t stand it any longer. So he jumped in the well,” he said, trowelling concrete onto a house he is building in the village.
“Though most were from outside, we still often see the people who beat us,” he added.
Xu Weiyi encouraged his children to marry “pure” Chinese to reduce the threat of foreign blood putting his grandchildren in danger.
“We are all people”, he said. “How could this possibly have been justified?”
Zhang’s father and others had their cases formally “overturned” after the Cultural Revolution, when Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping rehabilitated tens of thousands of victims.
“When I was younger revenge was in my heart. But what’s the point of revenge?” said Zhang. “Those people were also swept up in the policies of the day.
Beijing still tightly controls discussion of the Cultural Revolution and has not allowed a full historical reckoning, but domestic media have been able to tell the villagers’ stories in recent years.